AI-driven Business Transformation Lead in York

The position consolidates and formalizes the responsibilities currently performed under an independent contractor engagement, while expanding the scope to include technology translation for executive stakeholders, innovation initiatives, and cross-functional technical coordination. The role is designed to serve as a key bridge between deep technical execution and executive decision-making — ensuring that Go!Foton’s leadership has clear visibility into technology investments, product direction, and operational decisions without requiring direct immersion in technical complexity. Additionally, this role will drive an accelerated innovation culture, identifying and cultivating high-impact initiatives that keep Go!Foton ahead of the competitive curve in field operations technology.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Platform Maintenance & Reliability: Own the Go!Foton Service Platform’s production stability across app, database, authentication and cloud infrastructure. Monitor and resolve production issues across Project Management, finance, workforce, compliance, integrations, and marketplace features. Scale and optimize data infrastructure as volumes and usage grow. Help uphold engineering and security standards. Improve monitoring, alerting, and incident response (including backup/disaster recovery) to reduce downtime and protect data loss.
• Integration Support & Development: Maintain and extend integrations with third-party, customer and partner systems (PM, analytics, comms, background check providers, ERP systems, etc.). Build new integrations as needed (API design, authentication flows, data synchronization, conflict resolution, credential management). Ensure integration reliability and uptime across all connected systems through monitoring, rapid diagnosis, and resilience patterns.
• DevOps & Release Management: Maintain the CI/CD pipeline (GitHub Actions) including three-job validation (code quality, test suite, build verification), branch protection rules for main and staging environments, and deployment strategy. Reinforce engineering and security standards for quality, reliability, and maintainability. Coordinate releases to limit disruption, enable rollbacks, and align migrations with scalability goals.
• Feature Enhancement & Iteration: Continuously improve the project management suite using feedback, usage insights, and operational data. Own customer-facing integration triage; resolve issues quickly, including external-system impacts.
• Team Development & Knowledge Transfer: Create documentation, architecture decision records, and onboarding materials to scale the technical/engineering team.
• Technical-to-Executive Communication: Serve as a key technical liaison between engineering and executive leadership, translating architecture, technical debt implications, and infrastructure investments into business impact (cost, risk, revenue, positioning). Deliver executive-level technology briefings that turn complex topics into clear decisions with quantified trade-offs. Write executive summaries that convert sprint-level engineering output into strategic updates suitable for board-level presentations, investors, customer communications, etc. Provide rapid assessments on risks, vendors, competitive threats, and customer escalations.
• Strategic Technology Advisory: Advise on tech investments (build/buy, vendors, scaling, stack evolution) grounded in ROI. Assess emerging technologies for fit with Go!Foton’s operating model. Represent Go!Foton’s technology in customer, partner, and industry settings.
• Cross-Functional Alignment: Translate field workflows into prioritized requirements so the platform reflects operational reality. Set a cadence for executive-level technology reviews (health metrics, milestones, risks, resourcing, etc).
• Innovation Strategy & Execution: Help formalize a structured software innovation process to propose, evaluate, and prototype ideas. Identify high-impact opportunities from data and feedback; drive review and architectural alignment. Run rapid prototypes via feature flags, isolated environments, and time-boxed experiments. Support innovation reviews by presenting prototypes, assessments, and learnings.
• Emerging Technology & Competitive Intelligence: Track emerging platform technologies and share forward-looking assessments with engineering leaders. Benchmark competitors to spot differentiation opportunities (architecture, velocity, features).
• Scalable Innovation Infrastructure: Strengthen foundations for rapid delivery (modular architecture, patterns, documentation, tooling). Build reusable assets (components, templates, tests, internal tools) to speed future development.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications:

• Experience designing and leading a greenfield enterprise platform build (multi-portal architecture with scalable application and data infrastructure).
• Hands-on ownership of production reliability, monitoring/alerting, incident response, and backup/disaster recovery for mission-critical systems.
• Proven experience integrating platforms with enterprise systems (PM tools, analytics, notification services, background verification, ERP), ensuring reliable data exchange and continuity.
• Experience establishing automated development and deployment processes (CI/CD) that support reliable releases and stability across multiple environments.
• Strong security and access control fundamentals (least privilege, credential management, auditability) for trusted internal and external system interactions.
• Ability to support complex operational workflows end-to-end, including rapid troubleshooting and coordination across internal teams and external partners.
• Strong ability to translate platform architecture, risk, and investment trade-offs into executive-ready recommendations and decisions.
• Bachelor’s Degree.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Architected and operated a high-performance data environment supporting complex operational workflows (modeling, performance tuning, scalability).
• Applied reliability and resilience patterns for distributed systems and integrations (idempotency, retries, throttling, circuit breakers, observability).
• Experience designing core platform capabilities (e.g. labour marketplace matching, project performance tracking, mobile-ready field operations features).
• Track record producing clear technical documentation (runbooks, ADRs, onboarding guides) to enable scale and consistency.
• Ability to evaluate technology investments (build vs buy, vendors) and guide stack evolution with an ROI/total-cost-of-ownership lens.
• Built infrastructure for rapid experimentation and modular expansion (feature flags, isolated environments, time-boxed pilots) without disrupting operations.
• Strong cross-functional collaboration skills to translate operational needs into clear requirements and delivered capabilities.
• Ability to track emerging technologies and competitive trends and convert insights into practical platform recommendations.

TRAVEL REQUIREMENTS: Up to 30% required.